I'm a Software Engineer & Manager at SoundHound. This is where I share my thoughts on technology, design, travels, and life.

An Update on TopForty.it

Figured I would give a quick update as to how TopForty.it been doing. We’re about 2 weeks in, and the response has been great. People seem to love the idea, the execution and the UI/UX, which is heartwarming although I still think it’s rough around the edges (won’t tell you where because then you will notice it =D ).

Some stats: In 2 weeks, people have listened to over 5000 songs (5194 as of last night), totalling in a little under 25,000 minutes. Our visitor return rate is over 60% and the average time spent on site is around 30 minutes. These numbers seem to be increasing, which is good considering the fact that we haven’t really promoted it much (blogs, reddit, HN, etc.).The growth seems to be organic with 50% traffic from Facebook. As we add features, we plan to hit Hacker News and some blogs.

Update: Techvibes did cover us from the demo we gave at Velocity’s end-of-term Demo Day. Since them, we’ve also been featured on GigaOm and The Next Web

It’s been really fun to work on this project. I think where we are at now is interesting as we are trying get it out of the “hack” stage and into the “software” stage. Up until a certain point, you don’t give much importance to architecture, focussing on getting features out as quickly as possible. This is changing as the LOC grows. Since all the application logic is in JS, I have to spend a few days really cleaning that out. The good news is that YUI does a lot of the work for you, so I won’t have to refactor too much. I will take that time to pull in some of the new Y.App stuff that’s in 3.5.0.

I really do wish to write a blog post at some stage detailing how the UI works – as much as for my own records as for other people’s understanding. I have exams going on now, so it’ll probably have to wait till mid-December. I have started, but don’t want to publish something that’s half-baked.